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Event Detail

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama

About the SeminarDrawing on open-ended interviews with more than 60 political
staffers, accounts of practitioners, and fieldwork, Daniel Kreiss
will present on the previously untold history of the uptake of new
media in Democratic electoral campaigning from 2000 to 2012. He has
followed a group of technically-skilled Internet staffers who came
together on the Howard Dean campaign and created a series of
innovations in campaign organization, tools, and practice. After
the election, these individuals founded an array of consulting
firms and training organizations and staffed a number of prominent
Democratic campaigns. In the process, they carried their
innovations across Democratic politics and contributed to a number
of electoral victories, including Barack Obama’s historic bid for
the presidency, and currently occupy senior leadership positions in
the president's re-election campaign. This history provides a lens
for understanding the organizations, tools, and practices that
shaped the 2012 electoral cycle.In detailing this history, he will analyze the role of
innovation, infrastructure, and organization in electoral politics.
He will show how the technical and organizational innovations of
the Dean and Obama campaigns were the product of the movement of
staffers between fields, organizational structures that provided
spaces for technical development, and incentives for
experimentation. He will reveal how Dean’s former staffers created
an infrastructure for Democratic new media campaigning after the
2004 elections that helped transfer knowledge, practice, and tools
across electoral cycles and campaigns. Finally, he will detail how
organizational contexts shaped the uptake of tools by the Obama
campaign in 2008 and 2012, analyze the emergence of data systems
and managerial practices that coordinate collective action, and
show how digital cultural work mobilizes supporters and shapes the
meaning of electoral participation.He will conclude by discussing the relationship between
technological change and democratic practice, showing how from
Howard Dean to Barack Obama, new media have provided campaigns with
new ways to find and engage supporters, to run their internal
operations, and to translate the energy and enthusiasm generated by
candidates and political opportunities into the staple resources of
American electioneering. While these tools have facilitated a
resurgence in political activity among the electorate, this
participation has come in long institutionalized domains:
fundraising, volunteer canvassing, and voter mobilization.
Meanwhile, participation is premised on sophisticated forms of data
profiling, targeted persuasive communications, and computational
managerial practices that coordinate collective action. As such, he
will argue that the uptake of new media in electoral campaigning is
a hybrid form of organizing politics that combines both management
and empowerment.About the SpeakerDaniel Kreiss is an assistant professor in the School of
Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kreiss’s research explores the impact of
technological change on the public sphere and political practice.
In Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from
Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford University Press, 2012), Kreiss
presents the history of new media and Democratic Party political
campaigning over the last decade. Kreiss is an affiliated fellow of
the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and received a
Ph.D. in communication from Stanford University. Kreiss's work has
appeared in New Media and Society, Critical Studies in Media
Communication, The Journal of Information Technology and Politics,
and The International Journal of Communication, in addition to
other academic journals.